The Secret to Self-Control
Do you struggle with self-control, or am I the only one?
No. The struggle is real. Absolutely.
Okay, what's happening in a fasting space?
No food coming into the body.
Okay, but I say food for thought. All right.
We will replace the food into the physical body
with thoughts for the mind.
will that satisfy?
Okay, a hunger if we struggle with a hunger.
Listen, we're going to just flow in a space,
going to feed something deeper.
I love that analogy.
And the secret to self-control
okay, is not a title I made up.
Okay, I'm going to dive in to this book
today, Atomic Habits continuing on our journey.
And we are in chapter seven,
which is titled You Won't Believe It The Secret to Self-control.
And really happy to share these thoughts with you.
This is what I say food for
thought is really got me thinking last night.
I will tell you.
Grab a coffee, gravity settle in.
Take a deep breath.
Whatever is the stress that has gotten the best of it
and I'm talking to myself to is like,
let's let go of that for just a little bit.
A few minutes here center our mind about how
we can get back on track if we are on track.
Bless all of you who are keep on track.
You know, here's the thing like a recenter space.
Also, try to set up some guardrails, you know,
like bumper bowling, you know, have you ever done that?
Like they blow up the things on the side.
You can't you can't can't get a gutter ball.
Chapter seven I'm going to summarize how this starts out.
Just get into the frame of mind
I they getting into some Vietnam War history.
And I never recall really having the dates in my mind
so well, I didn't realize that this had stretched on for 20 years.
Oh my gosh. And.
Starting out as the Vietnam War headed into its 16th year,
they had this commission to study drug
use amongst troops in Vietnam, and they found some startling.
Things, which is that 35% of US service
members in Vietnam were using heroin
that was being sold to them by local people.
I don't know, you know, what was the flow that that happened,
but a full 20% were fully addicted to heroin in country.
And so the.
Army did a giant study on heroin addiction and troops.
And, you know, they had all this catastrophic
thinking about how, okay, this is going to be a huge problem. Now.
It was a huge it's a huge problem, but not quite as huge
as they had predicted,
because the thinking at the time was that addictions
could not be overcome, that once you became addicted to something,
it was permanent.
And so they're saying, where are you going to have this huge
wave of people is going to be a crisis.
Now, what they found in the study
is that 90% of heroin addicted troops
who came home never used again once they got home.
And what what an incredible finding this was.
Now 10% of people did and 10% out
of all the people that came home.
I say that's still a crisis, which is it was a crisis.
There's many crises in in there that, you know, really addressed.
I will say basically people saw this and it it sounds like as
I was reading into their like, oh, it's not a big deal.
And they went on and,
you know, a lot of people left, hanging out to dry, as it were.
But, the, the, the book does not make that point.
Okay.
That was my extra thinking as I,
I worked with many Vietnam vets when I worked at the VA and.
Oh man, I had a Agent Orange.
Okay, a lot of rough stuff.
But this study and the findings of it changed a lot of thinking.
When you realize, okay, the context matters, you know,
you think try to have self-control
when you are addicted to powerful opiate medicine.
Okay.
Very, very difficult.
But all of a sudden you change the environment. And local happens.
In the majority of cases, the
the collection of symptoms disappears.
Imperfect. Is key.
I like that phrasing.
Acting on real health habits is a journey that never ends.
Absolutely.
Used to always look for the goal weight instead of the lifestyle
changes through habits.
I love that, thank you.
That thought process, one of the chapters we were doing in
here was really dialing in, in that sort of mindset of like
when we were trying to get into the thought process
of compounding health benefits and health practices.
You're looking to the daily habits and the lifestyle
and the things that that, that that is what we enjoy.
Like this is some of where we're going
here, want to create a lifestyle that we enjoy.
So it's the thing we want to do.
I was saying yesterday I had a fasting day,
you know, because I was traveling and giving the talk,
and it just kind of puts me into the mindset.
And then also, I hadn't been doing some fasting when it was a
I went through just a roller coaster jet lag of all this stuff,
getting back from traveling.
And, you know, I had been kind of out of the practice of it.
I had done a lot of fasting when I was in Peru,
and then also I lost a lot of weight doing it,
which it wasn't really my intention.
And so I was kind of in a cycle out of it.
But then, you know,
I was not feeling so good in the digestive system.
I was like, I need a break.
Took a fasting day, felt so good.
I was like, oh yeah, this is why I find this
to be such a great thing to lean into.
I was like, so this is the sort of thing.
Do we have health habits and practices that we want to do?
And then what we're going to be diving in here.
What is the big key?
Do we have an environment that supports us to do it?
That says self-control is only as strong
as the ability to cope with the trauma we are facing.
Food can be the acceptable drug of choice.
It certainly is. It certainly is.
Yes. Yeah.
I'm gonna refresh the coffee
and just let's think for a moment on that like.
Self-control in the face of trauma we're facing,
whether it's present or past.
Let's leave that thought in as we hear the rest of this.
Okay. Here I'm going to just get into an actual section.
Now. Says the Vietnam studies
ran counter to many cultural beliefs about bad habits
because it challenged the conventional association
of unhealthy behavior as moral weakness.
I just think, what would that sentence,
you know, hit me when I think about how much we can guilt trip
and punish ourselves,
how much the medical establishment
just hammers people on, like moral weakness.
You know, I think that we make people feel so badly.
What I've tried to communicate many times on this channel,
and the reason I've brought in some of these deep
historical perspectives
is to realize that we here in our little lives,
are caught up in a gigantic,
you know, process that has been running for hundreds of years.
And I hope that that helps to take the pressure off.
And people have helped to comment and realize
just how abnormal this moment is
and the the number of difficulties and challenges
that people have not had to face, even in our physical body,
from the types of food
and the chemicals in it and the processing of it
and the marketing of it.
And these things is really, when you take a deep breath
and we can start to have a lot of compassion for ourselves,
he goes on.
If you are overweight,
if you smoke, if you have struggled with any type of addiction,
you have been told your entire life
it is because you lack self-control.
Maybe you've even been made to feel like you are a bad person.
The idea that a little bit of discipline would simply solve
all your problems is embedded into our culture.
Do you think that that's true?
Have you felt that?
I will tell you that I have, even felt that.
And I've felt it from the side of being someone who
I think would dish it out,
you know, as like,
this is how I was trained, I think, coming out of medical school,
and it's something that I had to spend
a lot of time really thinking about.
How am I talking to people and how am I communicating to people,
because it didn't take very many years
in medical practice for me
to realize that the process that I was giving people did not work,
and I would try to do everything that I was trained to do
and tell people, don't you need?
No, you know,
you need to just get off the couch and move, you know?
And he was like, guilt trip people and hammer people.
And I was like, you know, okay, I'm
going to give you more of those thoughts when I get into this,
because some of this is really getting into the psychology
of how we have gotten twisted
and tied up into the state that we are in.
Research, however, shows something different
when scientists
analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control.
It turns out that those individuals
aren't all that different from those who are struggling.
Instead, disciplined
people are better at structuring their lives in a way
that does not require heroic willpower or self-control.
In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations.
And I have reviewed studies like this in the past.
I've read and discussed this on the channel two.
I mean, this is very real sociological research.
People with the best self-control
are typically the ones who need to use at the least.
It's easier to practice self-restraint
when you don't have to use it very often.
And so yes, perseverance, perseverance, grit,
and willpower are essential to success.
But the way to improve these qualities is by not by wishing
that you were more disciplined,
but by creating a more disciplined environment.
Okay, that's one little section of this,
and I think there are definitely
some nuggets of wisdom, or at least things to ponder in there.
Finding the balance.
Yesterday in the session from the mountain as you we were like
really looking into this space where it was challenging us.
As I was saying, so many things are actually under our control.
And then I was really challenging that thought because like,
because I feel like, you know, very little is under our control.
And I guess it really comes down to our point of view.
You know, when we zoom way out and we look at the world,
of course we know we are not in control of it,
but when we are zoomed into our life, certainly
many things we can control,
especially when we take the pressure off
of controlling everything to perfection.
Embracing what Marie says, imperfect consistency,
which is a phrase I just am loving.
Let me zoom into this space and think about the
the ideas that I am throwing out
to us all here about like big picture environment,
meaning deep history and the global systems
and bringing things down
into our communities, families
and then our personal microenvironment.
When we get down here on this level, we actually have huge agency
to change the experience that we're having.
And I really love this type of thinking.
And so thinking another kind of paradox or another line
that I really want us to think about is what he's saying here.
Perseverance.
I did a thing last fall.
The title was Just perseverance and what an incredible quality is,
like a virtue that we should strive for.
Love it.
And and grit and willpower.
And you know,
if you look in the description for the video I wrote.
What did I write?
I tried to write something nice that was about,
you know, I put this picture, stop struggling.
And, That session
I did on perseverance, that I put a picture on that one,
just this beautiful row of river
or shoe bend, or is it in Utah or something?
Talking about this beautiful flow through the canyon,
carving through something very difficult, but very gently.
Here, I wrote, goes without saying that a weight loss
path is a struggle.
Absolutely.
We're trying to stop struggling.
I say this is what I'm trying to do on the channel.
Not here to sugarcoat anything, hype, anything.
Tell anyone that any process is easy,
but our goal is to make things as easy as possible to struggle
to the most limited extent possible,
while still getting the results that we want.
See, this is the type of line
that we are really trying to dive into,
and I like that he is talking us through on this.
Like, how do you build willpower?
He's suggesting here is not by like
having to practice it all the time.
Have you experienced this?
Like if you are surrounded in a space where it's like,
oh, difficult choice, difficult choice,
difficult choice, I don't really know that we,
you know, like, if we're lifting weights, right?
You say we get stronger. The body responds to that.
I don't think putting ourselves in a situation
where we use like willpower, weight training,
which is like always having to resist
attempting food or situation.
I don't think that builds willpower. Actually.
I think it might be the type of thing
that erodes it down over time.
What has your experience been? Like?
If there's a weight lifting willpower practice,
this book would suggest,
see how you think about it, that the process
is actually doing the work of building the environment
where you don't have to use the muscle.
You know,
where you don't have to be using the willpower all the time.
And then what happens as you're practicing it?
Then as we're flowing through the days, then we're building
the habits and the patterns of not doing those things, then
that is how we become the type of person
that is not doing the things that we don't want to do.
You know, that's
actually the process of building it up and strengthening it.
So already right there I'm thinking about.
Key thoughts that we have been thinking
from these beautiful books,
becoming a type of person, changing our identity
so that everything flows out of it is how do we stop struggling?
It's like.
Look at the environment that I'm in.
Look at the processes that I've had.
Look at the habits that I've built. Right.
Look at the expression I've created.
These are the types of words we have.
And then look at how I have been flowing through this.
And then we see the positive actions and steps.
And then it makes it harder to turn back from that.
So really I do like that thinking.
Alternatives instead of willpower works much better for me.
Yeah. Thank you for sharing that.
I do like that having options available.
You know, one of the hardest one of the hardest things, isn't it.
Right.
Like if you have something good, it's in the cupboard.
There's no alternatives to it.
And you get into a moment and then you're hungry is like,
you know, you're making it very difficult for yourself.
This is what I say.
Build out the fasting toolkit.
You know, it's like I said, even in one session, like,
what if we had a little fasting cart or something,
we could roll out and it's got on, you know, the fasting aids,
you know, and we could just have it there for us.
A beautiful picture that we can put our lemon ginger infused
water into, you know, or whatever
however you want to class it up and it's got tea right on it
and it's got or a coffee,
whatever you want that you could make up.
And maybe it's got a compartment under it where you keep
some broths that you could just heat up at a moment's notice.
You know, these, these sort of things. Alternatives.
Help us along the journey.
He says here, once a habit has been encoded, the urge
to act follows whenever the environmental cues reappear.
This is one reason
why behavior change techniques can often backfire.
If someone is having trouble with overeating, a weight loss
presentation can make them feel stressed,
and as a result, people might turn to their favorite coping
strategy and overeat.
So it was like, we can get into these self-reinforcing cycles.
Have you experienced something like that?
He goes through a whole bunch of anxiety about that.
Showing people who smoke pictures of smokers lungs,
make them anxious, drive people to reach for a cigarette, stuff
like this.
Right?
It's like, oh man.
So you have to be very thoughtful, very thoughtful.
I see many processes can end up feeding themselves.
Many of our bad habits try to make us feel numb.
And I can see that,
say we're experiencing something bad with some process,
whatever it is,
like we're looking for some sort of distraction
or coping mechanism or process.
Just say, take away these emotions from me for a period of time.
And that is often
what sets up these cycles, because most of the time
when we're approaching something in that fashion.
These things set up a cycle of helping in the short term
and making
and then setting the thing up for the next trip around the cycle.
And isn't that the way out?
The the quote from the other day that I loved so much.
Keep your heart open through everything and.
Was that the same quote I should look these things.
I should have this all in my mind. I should memorize them.
Keep your heart open through everything.
And then it was something about then. Then pain.
The heart will be your ally and pain can become.
Use pain to propel your progress.
Something like that.
But isn't it
that first part keeping the heart open through the struggle?
Isn't that the process of how you break a cycle like that?
Like if the cycle is that we are experiencing
negative emotions, we say, I'm overwhelmed by these things.
We reach for something in our space.
We say, maybe it is the food that is helping us
get through that cycle.
And he is saying here, doesn't
that help us to numb out the emotions for a while?
Isn't
that the same thing as that quote of saying that we aren't staying
connected through the heart
like they're saying, keep the heart open through.
The difficulty is the way out of that cycle.
I'm thinking that's what it's feeling like to me.
Isn't that what it's like?
Have you been in a situation
where you're struggling with a different emotion,
where you've been in a cycle and that you've gotten out of it?
I'm reflecting on some cycles like that.
Isn't there like a tax to be paid,
a toll, to be paid to get out of a cycle?
Doesn't that feel like experiencing some amount of difficulty?
Maybe that's just the process of change.
In general, change is difficult.
Thing they set up here as we're thinking about this okay.
So they're giving us all these perspectives on the environment.
We we I want to think deeply about our environment
and the struggle that we do have.
How much of that struggle is created by the environment we are in?
I think about the soldiers in Vietnam is probably
the most terrible environment you could have.
Of course, who can feel bad from someone?
Someone is handing you a drug that helps you to feel better
in the midst of this hell on earth.
And you know, it's not very hard
to see that I would want some of that, you know what I mean?
Like who?
Who wouldn't, you know?
The scenario they describe in this chapter is that people
who are in Vietnam,
like we are saying, who are dependent on heroin.
And then the problem vanished when they came back.
Our experience in the opposite
of what most rehab programs are like,
you know, for people who are struggling with addiction today,
people are taken out of their stable,
you know, structures that they have their
put into rehab for a couple of weeks
where all the triggers are gone.
That's like coming home from Vietnam, except
then you get sent back.
And so like, it's the inversion.
And this is we see in the statistics, like over
90% of people who are coming out of heroin programs reuse quickly.
Right.
This is just the opposite.
And so we can take examples like that.
And you think, okay, this is why like a retreat process like okay,
it can be so helpful.
Like you want to change something,
you get totally out of the environment, like all the habits are.
The triggers are all gone.
You know, I was like,
you know, we're sitting here wherever we are.
It's like we're going to fly to a retreat in the desert.
It's like all of a sudden it's a totally different place,
different people,
different schedule, different food, different everything.
Say, okay, easier to break habits.
There is like but then we have to go back, right?
And then that is the real thing.
And then the work begins.
A process like that, like,
you know, I have a vision in my mind is like a fasting retreat.
I would love to lead fasting retreats for people.
We go in the ideal scenario, if you know, if money is
no object, I would want to do a retreat in the mountains.
Everybody fly into, you know, Denver, Colorado
Springs or something, and we can, you know, if we had 20 people,
you know, then,
you know, renting out some beautiful mountain thing
would become affordable for people and.
Or a desert, some beautiful, natural place
where we can just really get out of the cycles.
You know, we'd practice fasting together
and we'd have our little cart of things.
So nobody, everybody have as much things.
And then, you know, a picture in my mind
say help people to flow through that space.
I would bring every good thing that I talk
and bring some artists and some musicians,
and we could do have some meditation space
and some gentle movement
and hopefully walk on a trail somewhere
and look at beautiful things.
So when you do something like that, I would find to be easier
to get out of cycles and habits.
And you say all of a sudden we're saying secrets of self-control.
People like, oh, I'm in this new environment.
Is the self-control actually easier? Like, look at this.
I flowed through so much more fasting space
in such a more beautiful way than I usually do.
I think part of it is what this is saying.
When you do something like that,
you clear out all the triggering things
that would put us in the cycles that we are normally stuck
in, all the cues
that would make us normally feel hungry or stressed.
Reach for something.
Do you think that's true? Could you envision a scenario?
If money were no object, you could put yourself anywhere on earth
with every resource that you could possibly have.
Do you think you could create an environment
where flourishing would be easier,
where you could flow through it more easily?
And so doing that, then we could take the hypothetical scenario,
if we can't manifest it
right away and compare it to like,
what does our life and process look like now?
And how can we start changing things to create the experience
we're having now to be more like that,
maybe just a little bit every day, giving ourselves more and more,
alternative ways of flowing through it in the long run, he says.
We become a product of the environment that we live in.
To put it bluntly,
he says, I've never seen someone consistent consistently
stick to positive habits in a negative environment.
A more reliable approach is to cut off bad habits at the source.
The most practical way to eliminate a bad
habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.
He says.
This is the first in the inversion of his first law.
His first law was make the good habit obvious,
and this is to make the bad habit invisible.
And I really like that.
So the secret to self-control need to lose it.
Use it less.
Is the perspective of James Clear?
What do you think of it?
Do you like it?
I do like it. I really do like it. And.
That is a food for thought.
So taking it into our life.
Okay, if we have the secret,
if the secret to self-control is using it less,
if the secret to stronger
willpower is practicing the use of willpower less and less.
You know, let's let's think about it.
If it was the case that we could get stronger
by using willpower and training it,
you say the end result would be, well,
I'm flowing through a space
and I'm not making these sort of decisions.
You know, it would look it would look good.
Say, I've practiced the willpower test so many times.
Now is so much better at it.
Like what he's suggesting in this reading
is the way we actually improve the willpower.
We do the work of changing the environment
so that we don't have to make that decision.
Do you see that
each of these would end up in the same kind of logical place?
We're in a place where
we're not making a certain decision, where we don't like.
And I would say that that resonates
like the experience that most people have
is that trying to brute
force your way through a difficult situation just doesn't work.
Have you experienced that?
It is not the type of.
Thing
like he says, like that last phrase, he's never really seen it
work, that someone just flourishes in a very negative
and difficult environment.
Isn't it the case that the real progress is made when we change
the environment, change the process, get upstream of things
is like thinking of our lifting analogy,
you know, to try to lift some extreme weight.
Like very hard, very hard to do.
How about we use some leverage?
When you get upstream of something, use a lever, right?
Easier to lift a weight if you've got a big mechanical advantage.
And so that analogy for this space I think is huge.
If if self-control is a huge obstacle,
it's like a boulder in our way is like,
how do we move it if we are just going up to it
and trying to just use our one human body to push
the giant boulders is very difficult.
The secret we'd build out this analogy,
we need to give that some space, right?
A lever needs space.
If we want to get leverage over something,
you have to give it some space.
You need a full crumb.
And the the longer the lever, the more leverage,
the further upstream we get from self-control,
the more leverage we have over it.
Really? Like that.
I want everybody to have a lot of leverage
over the situation, right?
So when we say, I say stop struggling,
it's like put our limited human effort
into the most high leverage actions,
putting ourselves in an environment
like we struggle with a certain food, a certain emotion,
a certain space where we are
stuck in a cycle, giving that some space
and getting leverage over it by going upstream is like saying,
I'm not purchasing these products anymore,
so they won't be in my house so that when the emotion hits
and I'm going to provide myself alternatives, like Pat says, see,
that is very high leverage.
Now we're putting our effort and intensity
and thoughtfulness way upstream.
Can you see that that will help us flow
through better than brute force will powering?
And then wouldn't the experience of that
be being a person with greater self-control,
because we have put ourselves
in a more thoughtful space and frame of mind.
And that's the that's the stat
I made up the other day for a fasting space is 10%
of it is the an actual fasting and healthy
eating process and 90% mindset.
And this is what I really want.
I think this thinking today is helping us to go along that line,
seeing that the secret to self-control
can actually be getting some space from it,
and then leveraging,
our, our limited mental capital
into the most effective way possible.
How are these thoughts sitting with you?
Do you find them helpful?
Encouraging?
Powerful I hope so, I do, I'm going to be thinking on it today.
some deep reflecting on life, the environment, how self-control?
How are you sitting with it in your life
and the struggles that maybe we've had, say, getting back on track
today?
Beautiful, I love it.
Be kind and gracious to yourself.
Try to take these thoughts.
Give yourself as much leverage over the process as possible.
Be well everybody.
